One of the issues with today's Ultrabooks (and with PC laptops in general) is differentiation—so many of the parts and features are similar across different models and manufacturers that it's hard to stand out from the pack. Ivy Bridge processor? Integrated graphics? 1366x768 screen? Everybody's got those. What else you got?

With its Satellite U845W, Toshiba is doing something that is at least different, if nothing else: this laptop takes the same insides used in other Ultrabooks and adds an ultra-wide 1792x768 display with a 21:9 aspect ratio, taking aim directly at movie buffs and multitaskers who need or want lots of horizontal elbow room for their windows. Is this super-wide screen enough to give the U845W an edge over other Ultrabooks, or does it push the laptop too far into niche territory?

The screen

The 21:9 1792x768 screen is marketed as being ideal for two things: watching movies in their native aspect ratio, and placing two windows next to each other. The screen's diagonal size is 14.4", but the extreme aspect ratio actually makes the U845W nearer the height of an 11" notebook while still retaining the width of a 14" or 15" model.

Enlarge/ Despite having a 14.4" screen, the U845W's height is more or less comparable to that of the 11" MacBook Air pictured here.

Andrew Cunningham

With two windows taking up exactly half of the screen, there is indeed a lot less horizontal scrolling than on a standard 1366x768 screen, though it's not banished entirely—most Web sites are designed around a minimum 1024x768 canvas, so the roughly 890-pixel-wide window still isn't quite wide enough to see everything.

Enlarge/ Most Web pages are 1024 pixels wide, and will still be partially obscured when viewed side-by-side.

Andrew Cunningham

To enhance the utility of the wide screen to heavy multitaskers, Toshiba has included a Split Screen utility, one of the most useful OEM add-ons I've encountered recently. It allows you to resize a pair of windows to take up disproportionate parts of the screen—allowing, for example, one window to take up a 1024 or 1366-pixel-wide space, and the second window to use the remainder. This can be useful in cases where you've got a browser or a document that needs more space, and another program like an IM or Twitter client that only needs a narrow strip.

Widescreen movies do indeed look nice on the panel, though 4:3 and 16:9 content ends up with even wider horizontal letterboxing than before—the laptop's wide screen is useful for those who like to watch videos while they work or browse the web, however. The laptop's speakers are loud and don't distort at high volumes, though as is the norm for laptop speakers, there's not much bass going on.

Enlarge/ Like the goggles, the U845W's screen does nothing for 4:3 content.

Andrew Cunningham

The U845W's TN display is mostly unremarkable—modest horizontal viewing angles, poor vertical ones, and slightly dull colors—but the main drawback of the screen is that, while the added width is nice to work with, the main problem with the 1366x768 screens that so many laptops are saddled with isn't horizontal resolution, but vertical resolution. 1792x768 is merely the 21:9 version of 1366x768, and by the time I had used it for a few hours I was already wishing for a bump to 2100x900 (which, incidentally, would also resolve the problem with viewing two 1024x768 windows side-by-side).

Construction and aesthetics

The U845W is part "midnight silver" aluminum (though to my eye it's a bit closer to burgundy), and part rubberized black plastic. The nice part about the latter is that it doesn't act as a fingerprint magnet, though dust does readily stick to it. Its port layout is decent but not exceptional—two USB ports and a 100Mb Ethernet port on the left; a card reader slot on the front; and another USB 3.0 port, an HDMI port, and headphone and microphone jacks on the right.

Enlarge/ The wrist rest corresponds to the black strip on the laptop's lid, which I thought was a nice subtle design touch.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ The SD card slot on the front of the laptop. This picture really illustrates how much dust the rubberized strip on the top of the laptop can pick up.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ On the right, the headphone and microphone jacks, a USB 3.0 port, and HDMI port, and the power jack.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ On the left, two USB 3.0 ports, the 100Mb Ethernet port, and the Kensington lock slot.

Andrew Cunningham

Open the laptop, and you'll be greeted by a hard plastic wrist rest and Toshiba's standard backlit Ultrabook keyboard—the same one used by the 16:9 Satellite U840 Ultrabook, the upcoming U925t convertible laptop, and others. It's not my favorite; the keys are a bit shallow and mushy even compared to other chiclet keyboards, and they are slightly rectangular—they're just as wide as the keys on keyboards from ASUS, Apple, Acer, and the like, but for some reason not quite as tall. Like all keyboards, you get used to it with some time, but it just doesn't feel as firm as I'd like.

The trackpad is a large, textured plastic multitouch affair with no dedicated buttons. With the latest drivers installed, it works predictably—tap-to-click, right clicking with two fingers, and sort-of-inertial two-finger scrolling are all available. The two-finger scrolling makes a go at being inertial, but the end result is sketchy. The version of the drivers I used also had a "coasting" option enabled by default which makes the scrolling continuous until you move the mouse, which you'll either have to get used to or disable in the trackpad's settings. Clicking the lower-left and lower-right corners of the trackpad (where the buttons would be on an older-style trackpad) also invokes left and right clicks.

The laptop's super-wide size may cause problems with bags or other accessories—my laptop bag is made to carry 13" and 14" laptops, but the end of the U845W sticks out a bit. The U845W also weighs in at a hefty-for-an-Ultrabook four pounds, while the thinner 11" and 13" Ultrabooks often weigh between two and three pounds.

Internals and performance

The U854w uses Ivy Bridge processors and chipsets and the Intel HD 4000 integrated GPU, which should tell you pretty much everything you need to know about its performance. Our review unit included a Core i7-3517U CPU running at 1.90GHz, the exact same chip found in the ASUS UX31A we reviewed, so I'll point you in that direction if you're looking for benchmarks. Cheaper versions of the notebook also ship with a 1.7GHz Core i5-3317U, the same CPU in the Acer Timeline A5 we reviewed—either way, Ivy Bridge Ultrabooks continue to be just fine for most general computing tasks. The bottom of the laptop does get warm while the laptop is working hard, and when the single system fan kicks in the laptop can get pretty loud—in normal use, though, it wasn't unpleasant to handle or to listen to.

Our review unit also included a zippy 256GB SSD, though lower-priced versions can come with standard spinning hard drives paired with small SSD caches. However, the U845W falls behind a bit in its networking capabilities. While others in this price class usually offer gigabit Ethernet and dual-band 802.11n wireless, our review unit offered only 100Mb Ethernet and single-band 2.4GHz WiFi.

Toshiba rates the SSD-equipped models at 9.05 hours of battery life, and the hard drive-toting models at 8.36 hours. This will obviously vary based on usage and screen brightness, among other factors, but the manufacturer's estimate seemed just a bit optimistic based on our time with the device—expect to get battery life in the in the high six-hour or low seven-hour range with all of Windows' default settings.

Repairability and upgradeability

The U845W has eleven Phillips head screws on its underside, one of which is hidden under a small rubber nub in the center of the laptop. Remove them, and the bottom of the laptop pulls away without much effort. There is a small cable that connects the power jack to the motherboard which comes off with the bottom case—you'll want to be careful with it while taking the laptop apart, and of course make sure to reconnect it during reassembly so the laptop will power on.

Opening the laptop gives you access to the RAM, mSATA hard drive, wireless card, and hard drive (for models with a mechanical hard drive). Interestingly, the SSD-only models appear to use an mSATA SSD and leave the main hard drive bay empty to save weight. You can see the area where a hard drive (probably a 7mm high version) would go below the memory and to the right of the SSD and wireless card.

There is a single available RAM slot in the U845W which can support up to 8GB of RAM, making for a total of 10GB when you factor in the 2GB of RAM soldered onto the motherboard. Any other upgrades or repairs would require further disassembly of the laptop, putting them well into warranty-voiding territory.

Windows 8 experience

The U845W's odd screen size is actually very well-suited for Windows 8, which will expand to take advantage of additional vertical pixels but is still very horizontally-oriented. The Start screen can display extra columns of tiles, and the Snap feature in particular becomes less obtrusive when you've got more space to work with.

Enlarge/ The Windows 8 Start screen makes good use of the additional horizontal real estate.

Andrew Cunningham

Enlarge/ Snapping apps in Windows 8 still leaves you with a nice 1366x768-or-so primary workspace.

Andrew Cunningham

Toshiba is also offering beta Windows 8 drivers that enable the native trackpad gestures: swiping in from the right edge of the trackpad with one finger brings up the Charms menu, swiping in from the left will cycle through your running apps, and swiping down from the top invokes app-specific menus. The beta drivers are a little cranky—not every gesture I made registered—but we hope the production-quality drivers will be a bit better.

Conclusions

The Satellite U845W has some interesting ideas, especially for multi-monitor multitaskers—given the choice between its wide 1792x768 display and a standard 1366x768 display, I'd be very tempted by the wider option. However, that same wideness can make it awkward to carry, and it's a bit on the heavy side compared to its other 13" brethren.

It's a very interesting idea and Toshiba deserves points for originality, but standard 16:9 computers with 1080p displays (like the ASUS Zenbook Prime) can still fit more on their screens than the U845W, and they do it in a standard-sized package that weighs less to boot. Even 1600x900 16:9 displays are very close to the U845W in terms of the amount of data they can show on-screen: Toshiba's widescreen experiment compares pretty favorably to the 1366x768 screens that glut the Ultrabook and low-to-mid-end laptop markets, but in most cases a higher-resolution 16:9 display is going to be a better choice.

The good:

Wide screen can be useful for multitaskers or movie watchers, especially in Windows 8 or on the desktop using Toshiba's Split Screen utility.

21:9 content looks good without the letterbox, though other aspect ratios suffer a bit.

SSD-equipped models are nice and quick.

Well-suited for Windows 8.

Not too hard to get into and upgrade, though 2GB of RAM is soldered to the motherboard.

The bad:

Vertical screen space is still at a premium.

TN panel is only average, which makes it less than ideal for movie watching (one of the U854w's main selling points).

Keyboard is a bit shallow and mushy.

Slow networking interfaces.

A bit heavier than standard 13" Ultrabooks.

Oddball form-factor may cause problems for those with smaller laptop cases.

The ugly:

A higher-resolution 16:9 notebook can fit more on the screen without the headaches that can come from using this oddly-shaped laptop.

I guess we're now seeing companies try 21:9 in the PC arena since demand for that aspect ration in the pure TV arena was DOA. Phillips released a 50" 21:9 set in 2009, and canceled any further production this year. LG says they want to continue to support the screen size, and even introduce a 29" monitor. All I can say is yuck. Wide is nice, but you also need vertical space, or else the display is too small to really be useful.

I see more usefulness on the PC side than I do on the TV side given that outside of a few movies, everything is going to be formatted for a 16:9. Even on the PC side, I prefer a 16:10 display. If I need wider, I can always add additional monitors. A better option given that a laptop would have to be pretty large to have acceptable vertical screen real estate with a 21:9 display.

It allows you to resize a pair of windows to take up disproportionate parts of the screen—allowing, for example, one window to take up a 1024 or 1366-pixel-wide space, and the second window to use the remainder.

Question: Are the two windows fully adjustable or do they have something like predefined snap to horizontal resolutions. In the article this seems a little vague but given that mine is a pretty defined question, that's understandable. Reason is when reading Ars I generally pull the horizontal resolution to about 700 pixles for reasons I won't go into in this query. Thanks!

It would be more useful if software was not designed vertically. Some software will let you move toolbars from the top to the side, but since the introduction of the ribbon bar that has become less and less common (not the worst thing I can say about the ribbon, but I'm trying to keep on topic here). 768 vertically is terrible for that reason. Even 900 is too small in my opinion.

The only advantage I can see is being able to open the laptop in cramped spaces. I literally cannot open my 17" laptop on an airplane, there is not enough room. So... I guess? For a very small number of people who spend a lot of time in cramped spaces, mostly watching widescreen movies? But I would rather get a normal aspect ratio at a higher resolution.

If the big feature of your laptop is the screen, you should try making the screen really good instead of just having more of it.

While I'm sure there are people who think "wow I would love an ultra widescreen for my video editing" I very sincerely doubt that they ever finish that thought with "768px tall, perfect!"

You just hit the nail squarely on the head.

I hated when laptops went widescreen, because manufacturers just took their old 1280x1024 panels and turned them into 1280x720. Plus, most documents are fairly vertical, so after you have enough width to avoid horizontal scrolling most of the real gains come from vertical height.

I blame widescreen TVs. Flat panel manufacturers used to make computer displays, but when TVs started going flatscreen they started thinking almost exclusively about HD resolutions and use cases where people sit 5-10 feet away from the screen. A 720p 13" panel makes perfect sense in a TV where you're too far away to see the difference anyway, but laptops are a different use case and people sit close enough to use the extra pixels.

<snip>I like my portables portable, and when I have real work to do, that's when I plug into a big monitor. These half-assed attempts fail the usability test completely.

I agree but for me the screen size seems intriguing for on the go uses. That said, while my work computer is a small form laptop for portability, it most of the time it sits on a full fledged port replicator most of the time to facilitate a full workstation setup.

Something really has to give with all this widescreen nonsense. I have no problem with the concept of widescreen monitors, but user interfaces are actually going in the other direction. Why is there such a horrible mismatch with this?

Let me give you an example. We're bringing in SharePoint at work. SharePoint is a web-based content management system. The UI from the top of the monitor goes like this: The window frame, IE 9 address bar, IE 9 tabs, IE 9 button bar, SharePoint ribbon tabs, the actual SharePoint ribbon, then a SharePoint quick links bar, then the actual content! I took a screencap and measured it out; the interface parts take up 246 pixels before you even get to the actual page content! That means that fully 32% of the vertical space is taken up by UI. Then most pages have a title and other header information before you get to the real meat of it.

Either the hardware people really need to stop making things wider, or UI designers need to catch up and start putting UI elements off to the sides instead of on the top. I really don't care which it is, or even make it configurable for the UI, but really, doing things on laptop screens can be so painful because of this.

On a related note, does it bother anyone else when UI elements aren't balanced on the left and the right? I love putting the Windows 7 task bar on the side, but it drives me nuts that I can't have two bars, one on either side. For some reason having things unbalanced horizontally really makes a UI distracting for me. Am I just picky, or do other people notice this too?

Windows 8 is kinda horizontal in a lot of it's layout, so maybe it makes sense there. But since everything I've heard of 8 makes me want to cling to 7 desperately, I think that laptop might be too soon.

The only way I would support this aspect ratio is in televisions IF they were to use the extra space to introduce those annoying on-screen ads as side-bar ads instead of getting in the way of the damn show I am trying to watch. Really hate those ads - and they insist on making them bigger and over a longer duration so that it kinda reminds me of the Web from the 90's. I know, I know - it won't happen...but a man can dream

It'd be more impressive if they treated the single display as two virtual displays. What I hate most about the Metro part (and I've gotten used to Windows 8 in general and generally like it) is that the split-screen mode is too limiting. If you want to have a small strip of desktop, you're limited to a preview of your open windows, and if the Metro app is in the small area, generally it is quite limited in what it displays. I'd like to be able to, say, view a document in the Metro Reader, while writing a document in Word 2013. If they could logically split the display, that would become possible.

To enhance the utility of the wide screen to heavy multitaskers, Toshiba has included a Split Screen utility, one of the most useful OEM add-ons I've encountered recently. It allows you to resize a pair of windows to take up disproportionate parts of the screen—allowing, for example, one window to take up a 1024 or 1366-pixel-wide space, and the second window to use the remainder.

It's like a tiling window manager then? I love using Python-windows-tiler myself.

I'm no apple expert, but as I understand it although the native resolution of that screen is 2880x1800 the OS makes you run it at 1440x900.

Not quite. The display is always running at the native res, the OS just doubles the UI elements giving you effectively 1440x900 worth of space. If "OMGEYECANDY" isn't your bag, you can turn it off and just roll 1:1.

Firstly: I want my 16:10 panels back. Nothing is nearly as good for displaying two A4 pages side-by-side. This is my computer, a general-purpose device, not a mulrimedia device. Keep that crap on the tablets. Hell, when I'm mucking around in the console, I kinda want a 4:3 ratio, but its just too impractical the rest of the time.

Wider adoption of 3D should end this 21:9 nonsense once and forever. It is all about virtual reality, and 3D effect is noticeably inferior on vertically-challenged screen. Mark my words: even hollywood would soon abandon it.

The argument that Windows 8 makes ultra-widescreen somehow more useful is somewhat stupid. How much time do you spend in that metro start screen, anyway? Most of the time, you're inside an app, often inside a browser. Scrollin, scrollin all the time with that kind of screen.

Wider adoption of 3D should end this 21:9 nonsense once and forever. It is all about virtual reality, and 3D effect is noticeably inferior on vertically-challenged screen. Mark my words: even hollywood would soon abandon it.

Joke post? I thought "wider support" and "3D" was an oxymoron. I kinda agree that 21:9 for a pc monitor is a bit of a stretch (pardon the pun).

Like a lot here have said. Stop making wider resolution and think vertically a little bit more. Most laptop comes by default with 1366x768 resolution. I don't know for most people, but on a monitor larger than 11" I would want higher resolution, 1366x768 on a 15" should be illegal.

Most monitor should have at least 1080 of vertical resolution and like a lot of people I don't watch movies on my PC or laptop, I connect it to my 65" TV in the living room for that so that the monitor be perfectly 16:9 I don't care, just give me height!

Imagine text formatted correctly to fit the whole screen width. Reader head turning left and right akin to tennis match viewing following really long long lines of text. There is a reason why journals format their text in more than one column!

Something really has to give with all this widescreen nonsense. I have no problem with the concept of widescreen monitors, but user interfaces are actually going in the other direction. Why is there such a horrible mismatch with this?

Huh? All the UIs I use have more stuff on the sides. And allow me to move more stuff to the side to boot.

In fact, 3DS Max is bad enough at this that 2 monitors is almost a requirement for any serious work, since you need to move several windows over so you can see both at the same time. Of course you could arrange them vertically if you wanted, but that's a bit weird.Also, there are at least as many toolbars to the sides.